I first came across this in an anthology of gothic short stories, but I’ve seen it described elsewhere as a prose poem. It’s a Holocaust story, but one that’s concerned with aftermaths. The narrator’s cousin Gene has brought the shoe home from the war. It sits on his mantelpiece for a time, but is eventually packed away in the cellar. The voluble narrator assures us that Gene will tell us all about it if we ask. We might not be so sure. Gene, I’m guessing, is traumatised, but the real victim is whoever owned that shoe. However long he contemplates it, Gene will never know that person or grasp what happened to them; hiding the shoe in his cellar won’t stop it nagging away at him. The narrator can spill out, without too much difficulty, a version of Gene’s story, but Gene remains opaque to them and to us, while the original owner of the shoe is at a still further remove. A reader might ask why Gene would have taken the shoe home in the first place. It could seem like a morbid or inappropriate thing to do. I don’t disagree, but such a reaction itself raises the question of what might constitute appropriate behaviour in an unprecedented situation. It’s probably apparent by now that I like a story with a plot. This one is more of a character study, I suppose, or so it seems on the surface. In fact, it contains enough plot for a long novel, but chooses not to spell it out.
First published in The Miner’s Pale Children, Atheneum, 1970. Collected in American Gothic Tales, ed. Joyce Carol Oates, Plume, 1996. Available to read online here
